1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to face and other object detection and recognition, particularly using parallel template matching with different sets of classifiers trained for detecting different objects and/or faces and/or different configurations, orientations or image capture conditions of objects and/or faces in digital images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Viola-Jones proposes a classifier chain consisting of a series of sequential feature detectors. The classifier chain rejects image patterns that do not represent faces and accepts image patterns that do represent faces.
A problem in face or other object detection and recognition processes arises when different faces or other objects appear in a scene or configured, oriented and/or captured differently such that a distribution in a large area of face/object space makes correct classification difficult without resource or time-intensive analysis. Different faces or other objects, or faces or other objects with similar configuration, orientation or image capture conditions such as illumination tend to be clustered together, and correct clustering of images of the same person or object is difficult. It is desired to be able to detect and/recognize within digital images different faces and other objects, and same faces and objects having different configurations or orientations or captured under different image capture conditions, while also conserving temporal resources.